Perfect, or Whatever

Paul Thompson speaks with Mike Powell about his debut novel, “New Paltz, New Paltz.”

By Paul ThompsonSeptember 26, 2025

• Fiction

IT TAKES ABOUT 40 minutes for Mike Powell to say something so obviously ridiculous that it insults my intelligence. Speaking over the phone from his home in Tucson, Arizona, he tells me that he’s never considered himself a particularly good critic. While I’m willing to take him at his self-effacing word—he goes on to explain that his skittishness about the medium creeps in when he’s tasked with making superlative statements, or assigning tangible metrics to reviews—Powell’s work as a music critic is spoken about by his peers with uncharacteristic, and unironic, reverence. His intermittent dispatches at Pitchfork are so sensitive, so precise, and (perhaps to his horror) so authoritative that they can effectively end the discourse around a record or an artist. What, I’ve often thought after finishing one of his essays, are the rest of us supposed to write now?

In June, Powell published his first novel, the slyly totalizing New Paltz, New Paltz. Originally written more than a dozen years ago (Powell completed an MFA at the University of Arizona in 2013; he has since written a series of columns for The Paris Review about living in that state), the book follows a tabloid fact-checker whose laconic journey through postmillennial New York is rerouted by a seemingly minor love affair. It’s a little bit wistful, frequently hilarious, and—to borrow the dummy phrase Powell uses to scoff at the very project of summing these things up so tidily—“reflects the world at its most interesting.”

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PAUL THOMPSON: You wrote a version of this novel in 2012. What was the process of deciding to touch it up and put it out? Had you wanted to revisit it for a long time?

MIKE POWELL: I kind of deliberated with myself about whether to be evasive or disclosing about this. But I wrote a version that I would say is significantly different, many years ago, and during the intervening years shared it with one of the people who ended up starting the press Double Negative. They said they’d be happy to publish it as is, and I said, “No, thanks.” I spent some time late last year going back through it and rewriting a lot of stuff and generally getting it into a shape that was not going to make me puke.

I had brief periods of tinkering, but I was also raising two children, and working, and buying a house. It frankly was not on my mind until it was. Despite having drafted other things in the intervening years, it felt important for personal, mystical reasons to let this project go. It’s a very short book; it’s not like I’ve been agonizing over it every day for 12 years.

When you returned to it, did you find you were responding differently to the thematic concerns from how you would have when you first wrote it?

It felt like some of the agitation I’d felt when I was younger and writing this had dissipated. I don’t know how much of that has to do with the miracle of aging and just getting some distance from it. But part of what was satisfying about letting it go was being able to step back from it and see how my relationship to it has changed. I look back on it and recognize my own preoccupations in a way that’s a little funny, a little mysterious on a personal level.

Preoccupations like what?

I realized there was an emotional neutrality that I really appreciated and would not have been able to recognize until I was a little bit older. Just a certain ambivalence in tone and a way of regarding other people. So it’s not so much specific preoccupations—I still think dogs are weird, I still think work is humiliating a lot of the time—but in terms of the spiritual tenor, I can see myself pulling in the direction of where I now am as a person.

The narrator is so finely—and unusually—calibrated. He has no grand artistic ambitions. He wants to buy this expensive shirt, but he’s not obsessed with social mobility. He’s also not a nihilist; he’s not a burnout. And still he doesn’t feel blank. How’d you arrive at this?

You say “how could I arrive at it”—that’s a question that’s sort of beyond my existential ken, you know what I mean? It felt very natural to me. But you’re not the first person to observe that—that he doesn’t fancy himself a thinker or an artist or whatever. To the extent that there’s autobiographical material here, that came very naturally to me. In terms of the writing, I really did want it to be funny. I think thinking comes very naturally to me. I don’t think I wanted him to be tortured or anything like that. I didn’t want him to be particularly successful. I guess he’s a dime a dozen—but who among us? I don’t know.

There are times when the narrator gets into a kind of sub-Zen flow state from the bullshit he has to do at his job. Is that something you’ve been able to access to work, or is it aspirational to you?

I think I’ve accessed that. Look, there’s a confluence of ailments that produce that mentality. If you have a dim sense of yourself and what you’re capable of, then it’s easy to feel that whatever job you have is exactly the job you should have. I think he feels he’s right where he ought to be, which is certainly a feeling I’ve had plenty of times, only to periodically wake up and be like, “Actually, maybe I should do more, maybe I should work harder, maybe I should be more ambitious.” I think his relationship to work is familiar to me. I see him at some kind of weird peace. He is sort of at peace, right? I think part of that comes from not always looking at your circumstances in terms of “What would I prefer, what do I like, what do I not like, where’s my agency?”

If I may say, I think that’s a grand societal ailment: to look out on the world and be like, “Well, I deserve more, I could do better.” Or, “I need more.” I think that’s a real sickness. At the same time, work in this country is structured to take advantage of you and denigrate you in many ways. So far be it for me to judge—those are just things I’m observing. But if you’re attuned to the rhythm of whatever it is your work is, you stand a chance of learning a lesson that’s far more valuable than any sort of accolade that the work itself could provide. And I have had that experience. Who knows? I could be a slacker and I’m just not sure.

You’ve worked for magazines and newspapers. This feels lived-in, but I really appreciated the restraint of not making it another book of breathy ruminations on the nature of that. Did you ever actually fact-check?

I was a fact-checker at Us Weekly for a couple of years when I was younger, and so that stuff was stuff I experienced. I suppose it’s sort of interesting from a cultural-historical perspective, in that it was not fully internet-ized in a way that it would be now. I do find some inherent comedy in being a fact-checker at a magazine like that. It’s not straight-up gossip, right? They have legal teams. So, on some level, you were just checking spellings. On another level, it felt sort of absurd to uphold the veracity of all this stuff.

I don’t really have specific anecdotes about this—the book gets into what it would be like to really fuck up at this job in a way that I didn’t necessarily experience—but you’re working at a major publication; according to the rules of that particular game, the stakes were high. Everything had to be exactingly correct. Broadly speaking, even if I screwed up at my job, it wasn’t going to have any consequences for people in the way that I understand them. But the people I worked for wanted to put out a product that was seamless, and perfect, or whatever.

There’s this sense throughout the book, even though the narrator almost never lapses into omniscience, that he’s recounting things from a distance. Yet there’s only one time when you make this explicit—after the narrator sleeps with Lucy, when he notes that it would be the only time it ever happened.

I didn’t want to present this as somebody looking back on a period in their life from some distant vantage in the future. That was one of the few times it came into play: do I tip my hand that way? To me, the whole thing is so inescapably saturated in that feeling of longing that it just felt right to write it that way. But I did stop and say, “Does this open me up to a different sort of approach to the plot?” And like many decisions I’ve made in my life, I decided not to think too much about it.

I look back at my life and I’m surprised by the things I remember. Relationships that seemed insignificant turn out to be very salient for reasons I still don’t understand. I’m not going to tell you what meaning I take from them, only the fact that they appear in my mind. And so I think that that was—I don’t want to say I was writing toward that, but I was very open to the feeling. The people you meet who would not count in your inner circle but who for whatever reason stick around in the story of your life, in the way you tell it to yourself. Relationships that are easily dismissed. Hopefully everyone’s had the bittersweet experience of the one-night or two-week relationship where it’s, you know, easy to flush from your mind at the time, but … I don’t know. It keeps coming back. That’s not an autobiographical part of the book. The general experience, sure, but I’m not thinking about a specific old flame.

You described the feeling that we’re all entitled to more as a societal ill. This is not a universally applicable critique of therapy, but a lot of soft, pop-therapy culture today does breed a kind of low-level narcissism in people, where everything revolves around them. Therapy, and therapists, pop up in the book in amusing ways.

Well, I just want to say before I start that you’re going to regret opening this subject to me. First of all, I don’t think I ever would have told my therapist about my societal critique because it would have felt too personal. I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t write this book—it has a lot of thinking in it, and I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking, being inward. That comes to me very naturally. I don’t think of therapy as a place to heal yourself or find a path forward. I think if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re sort of doomed from the get-go—that’s my totally nonclinical opinion.

Honestly, about the always-wanting-more stuff—it’s funny, I had never connected it to therapy because I think therapy can be a very healthy practice for most people—I’ve always connected it to when I was in college and they introduced a digital touch-screen menu for ordering sandwiches at the gas station. And at the time, I was like: too many choices. The more people get practice in making choices about every little thing, the more they’re going to feel like nothing is quite right. I hadn’t thought about it in conjunction with therapy before. I don’t want to denigrate therapists; I’m friends with many therapists.

The narrator goes into the process, it seems, not fully engaged, already assuming it’ll be something he finds hard to access.

That’s sort of an experience I’ve had. I’ve gone into therapy being like, “Okay, what I’m supposed to do is narrate my life, and somebody’s going to be able to pick out something about it and make me course-correct.” In that way, I’m probably an awful therapeutic subject—and, in gentle ways, have been told so by at least one therapist. The narrator in this book, I suspect, goes to therapy for the reason most people do: there’s an existential pebble in your shoe, something’s wrong, and everyone else seems to be doing it.

Taking the question of “do I like this or not” in another direction, the book offers a lot of opportunities for you to practice criticism in abbreviated, capsulized form. There’s the reading of his Balthus painting, his reaction to the book of photography, even the way he experiences something like walking through a museum’s foyer. Did you think about giving him a different critical perspective, a different underlying psychology from the one you yourself have?

I get very squirmy around grandeur. It was easy for me to talk about how I hate male American painters from the fifties or whatever. That ties back to the whole main character thing, being invested in your own arc. I definitely thought a lot about my own critical work while writing; I didn’t think much about accessing another psychology. I don’t think I would weep at the romantic comedy the way the narrator ends up doing.

But even when you get the sense he’s beset by some intermittent angst, he’s open to basically every artistic experience, and most human ones.

I think I can rock with that. In terms of biography—I don’t think of myself as a good critic, and one of the reasons I’ve been not great at continuing to pursue that work is that I feel really bad making judgments, frankly. I know that’s only a small, service-oriented mode of criticism. But I always found it very difficult to make that final step toward “And this is why this piece of art reflects the world at its most interesting.” It’s always very hard for me to advocate for things that I love. So, in that sense, that ambivalence and openness, I come by it easily. I have volunteered to be part of some very, very tedious experiences in my life—and gotten some great entertainment, belatedly, out of them. I’ve gotten in long conversations outside public libraries with people who don’t have very thorough opinions or perspectives. I do think being open is something I wanted to convey, and something I find … I don’t know … dare I say, valuable?

What I find interesting—or valuable—in criticism is almost always description rather than evaluation. The narrator’s account of the book of photography is what I want; every bit of description, or nearly every bit of it, has inherent value judgment.

At the risk of getting into a conversation about the cultural position of criticism in this day and age, I think great, great criticism does that, and has the space to do that, and is afforded the trust to do that. When I read The New York Review of Books, I’m not looking for someone to be like, “You ought to buy this book.” I’m trying to learn about something, and if it’s described in an interesting way, that’s enough. I could sit and talk about lines from, in particular, music criticism, about music that didn’t really resonate with me, but the writing about which really did. I think the ability to assess, to be present with, to describe in engaged ways is plenty. When you start having to put numbers and stars on things—which I totally understand the need to do—I get really skittish.

I love Charles Portis; he’s an artist who deeply affected me. What I get out of Portis, aside from humor and whatever, is that real sense of very steady neutrality—and observing something very carefully but not often feeling like, for as judgmental as his characters can be, bringing readers into a space where they can just be tickled by it.

I think that’s why, in Portis, I find myself gravitating toward the descriptions of the normal worlds his characters inhabit, before they leave on their journeys, their quests, whatever. I just love him moving through a crowded space.

One hundred percent. I got that from his writing, and I think I fell in love with his writing because of that. And I really don’t want to become someone who’s yakking about how great Charles Portis is, but the quest is always kind of a MacGuffin, right? The quest is an excuse to write about the gas station along the way. It’s always an excuse for description. I wanted to bring into this book the feeling, as a reader, of being on the page, page after page. The first time I read Gringos, it took me a while to figure out what was going on, just because I’m not great about reading for plot. But I was so delighted by the succession of pages. To me, at the risk of being platitudinous, that is the reading experience.

I feel the same way, but when it became clear to me how clean, how inevitable, how propulsive the shape of New Paltz, New Paltz was going to be, that brought me some delight.

Oh, it’s not that I’m not aware of it—I adopted the idea early on that he’s going to go from one place to the other in pursuit of something, however flailing or unacknowledged that pursuit is. And now I have some ground to stand on to write the stuff I really want to write.

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Mike Powell is a writer from Tucson, Arizona. His criticism and reporting have appeared in Pitchfork, The New York Times Magazine, The Ringer, and The Paris Review.